Erminia asked us if we would like to go to St Giovanni Rotondo to see Padre Pio. Padre Pio is an interesting phenomenon in Southern Italy and I believe also in Spain. He was a monk who prayed either for the ending of the First World War or the second and was rewarded with the stigmata for his efforts and walked around with bandages on his hands and feet for the rest of his days. After the Second World War he decided to raise money for the building of an enormous hospital for the poor in St Giovanni Rotondo, the tiny hill town in northern Puglia where he lived in the local monastery. His stigmata were regarded I believe with scepticism by the Catholic Church, but he was a friend of Pope John Paul, who ultimately made him a saint a year or two ago (he died in the 1960s). You see Padre Pio’s image everywhere in Southern Italy, in shops and houses, outside public buildings and frequently in the cabs of Italian HGVs and St Giovanni is now a huge place of pilgrimage, full of tacky hot...

Every May a plaster Madonna from a local church does the rounds of our parish or “contrada”, spending a night in each house.  Each night the locals gather to say their “hail Marys” in front of the Madonna, before she moves on to the next house.  When it was our turn we tidied up the dining room and put a nice tablecloth on the dining table along with some flowers and a couple of candles.  Then most of the women of the contrada and their children came along from the previous house, perhaps twenty people in all, to see the Madonna installed for the night.  She is a plaster figure maybe two feet high, with, rather touchingly, one finger missing and a white plaster scar where the finger should be.  I quite liked having her around for the evening and bravely resisted taking a photo of her in dark glasses or with a cigarette trailing from her fingers.  Call me superstitious, but I also bought a lottery ticket that night.  Next day they all trooped round f...

One mark of our becoming increasingly established down here is that this month we finally got our Permissions to Stay in Italy. In theory this is more or less a formality for EU citizens, but in practise we had to drive the fifty-odd miles to the Police Station in Bari every fortnight, usually to be told that our documents were not ready. When we did eventually get them, Sue on a roll immediately applied for residency and is now the only English person resident in the Commune of Locorotondo. Which then meant that finally we could buy a car and a motorcycle here. So for €2,000 we bought a ten year old Opel Corsa from a local garage and a little later I walked into the main Moto Guzzi dealer in Taranto and said “I would like to buy an Italian motorcycle”, to an almost tumultuous reception. Moto Guzzi make robust twin cylinder motorbikes that are old fashioned and unfashionable in Italy. I bought a six-year-old 750cc machine that is absolutely perfect for blasting around the count...

This feels strange. I’m sat in my home office, transported at ludicrous expense along with the rest of our furniture from London. In the last couple of weeks the building work on the house has suddenly started to come together and for the first time in three years we are living in relative comfort. The interior of the old stone part of the house is more or less finished and we have an elegant living and dining room with a domed stone ceiling and a fitted kitchen complete with washing machine and dishwasher. There is still much to be done to the modern extension to the house and to the exterior, but for the first time we are able to unpack things and feel more or less confident that they will be staying where we put them.

A good friend, Peter, died this week. Most of you won’t know him. We met Peter and his partner Jude in Porto di Roma last winter. Jude is an artist and teacher and Peter had been many different things in his life, including a great swimmer, potter, teacher and financial products salesman. He and Jude had crossed the Atlantic twice in their small eight-metre yacht “Flight”, which they have owned from new for the last thirty years. Even in his fifties he had the curiosity of an eight year old and the guts to look into the abyss and say “hmm, this is interesting”. Peter and Jude were due to visit us in Puglia in their yacht last August, when Peter had a seizure and they had to fly back to the US for treatment. Peter had been living for a couple of years with the knowledge that he was slowly dying from a brain tumour. On returning to the US he declined quite rapidly. Jude documented their trials in regular emails to their many friends around the world. From the mails it sounded a...

One morning we were minding our own business on our terrace when Erminia’s daughter in law Palma bowled up the drive with her daughter, also called Erminia. They were carrying a plastic bag. Palma’s husband Domenico and her son Paolo (our builder) had been out shooting and guess what they’d brought for us? I peered nervously into the bag, six lovely dead Thrushes for the table … mmmm. “Er, what do you do with them?” I asked. Immediately, Palma thrust her hand into the bag and plucked and gutted the little fellahs. “Cook them for ten minutes in a little tomato sauce with some pancetta (bacon) and they’re lovely.” As a fully paid up carnivore I felt obliged to cook them, though I did chop the heads off, said to be really tasty, as I couldn’t bear looking at their accusatory little eyes staring out of the pot from their tiny grey lizzard like bodies. Actually they tasted OK, a bit like a cross between chicken and liver, though Sue couldn’t bring herself to sample them. Overall...

Since moving into the house in August we had been led to expect that the olives would be ready for harvesting in late November or December. We had also decided that we would probably not harvest this year given everything that needed to be done on the house. However, our developing love affair with the land and the enthusiasm of our 78-year-old neighbours Erminia and Paolo soon made us change our minds. In the event, Erminia, who we are also discovering is a bit of a wind up merchant, looked into the sky one morning in early November and said “the harvest is early this year, I’ve made an appointment at the olive mill, would you like me to make one for you too.” So, we found ourselves with an appointment at the Mill for ten days later with no clear idea what to do. Unsure of exactly how much work was involved we invited two Swedish and two American friends who were over wintering in the Venetian Lagoon to come and join us for a few days. Erminia offered to give us some instructio...